Google Makes Decision on Close Variant Keyword Matching in Adwords

It's clear that to be successful in today's business world, a company must be findable on Google. What’s more, many advertisers have spent countless hours trying to perfect their paid search campaigns on the search engine. However, now Google has made an executive decision on two types of AdWords campaigns.

Google has announced that starting in late September "close variant keyword matching" will be applied to all exact match (ads only appear when users search for exact keyword searches) and phrase match (ad appears when users search for exact keyword only or exact keyword with additional words before and after it) AdWords campaigns.

In other words, advertisers that have leveraged exact or phrase-match campaigns will now have their advertisements show up when search queries are made using alternative spellings or even queries containing misspelled words that Google deems related to your keyword(s).

At the beginning of their blog post, Google states that at least 7 percent of searches made on their search engine contain a misspelled world. Google also states that since introducing close variant keyword matching, advertisers that have enabled the feature have seen an average of seven percent more exact and phrase match clicks.

Previously, advertisers have had the option to disable close variant keyword matching but this will be taken away come late September. For those that already have the option enabled, Google reports that they may not notice any differences in their keyword matching behavior.